VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Speaker 1:
I feel like it’s half circumstance and half choice. You still have the ability to go out and go to school and go to work if that’s what you really want to do, to pull yourself out of poverty. But as far as like being born into it, that’s kind of out of our hands.

Speaker 2:
In my opinion. I don’t think it’s, it’s usually a choice but it definitely can be.

Speaker 3:
I think it’s all about your will to work your determination sometimes.

Speaker 4:
Some people choose to stay in that life form and some people choose to seek help and seek the steps to getting out of it.

Speaker 5:
I think we need a lot of more people to lift people up and to walk with them through their situations, to get them out of poverty.

Andrew Green:
I know in this line of work too, and just the way, different ways we’ve been raised, we’ve had mistakes that we’ve made along the way and things other mistakes you’ve seen made. But what kind of comes to mind when you think about mistakes?

Phil Edwards:
I remember working with at-risk youth in Atlanta and we had a summer job training program, creating access and opportunity for youth to work so they can help pay some of the bills at home. And there was this one young man, and these guys were early teenagers, early teens, rather 13 and 14 years of age. And one of the young guys started working with the other two and he probably showed up for work for one week. And then after that, he didn’t show up and because we all lived in the same community, I knew where he lived. I knew his family and so I approached him. I pursued him and asked, why aren’t you working? Said I don’t really want to, and I challenged him. You got to work. Working is important and you’re think about the misconception. Some of that is reality. People don’t want to work, but I think we have to understand the why.

Phil Edwards:
And as it turned out, this young man was really check and he was actually putting me to the test to see if I would commit to him. And what he really was looking for was another man to pursue him. So he grew up with the father, but his father divorced the mom. And so the mom and the kids moved from North Carolina to Georgia. So he didn’t have a male figure in his life. So he didn’t know me that well, and I believe he was really wanting me to pursue him and, and I rode him off. Initially I just said, look, if you don’t want to work, I was very hard on him, because I know the struggle, I experienced it as an at-risk teen. And I knew how hard it was. How important was the work hard, not only just approve anything, but just to survive.

Phil Edwards:
And I knew if he didn’t work, that he would set himself up for failure, but I pushed him. And I just, almost just rode him off to say that fine, if you don’t want to work, then I don’t have anything to do with you. And I didn’t realize just the mistake I made, because I didn’t think about what was going on inside of him. I didn’t think about what he needed. I saw the outside. I saw that he wasn’t working. Right. And if you don’t work, as the Bible says, you don’t eat. And if you don’t work, then you don’t have a job.

Phil Edwards:
But I realized for him, and I’m not saying this is the case for every inner city kid, a poor individual who doesn’t want to work. But I’m saying for him, as it turned out, he was putting me to the test and he needed me to pursue him. So something he needed, there was an emotional issue that he was struggling with or even a psychological thing that he was going through. He needed me to pursue him. And I didn’t at the time, because I pretty much say you don’t want to work. Then I have nothing else to do with you at the time.

Tim Streett:
Yeah.

Phil Edwards:
That was a big mistake.

Tim Streett:
Yeah, the answer to your question is not having a hard time coming up with a mistake. It’s narrowing it down. One, I think one point you made is I think, one of the things I tell, I do a lot of teaching and I work with college age kids a lot. And I tell them, particularly Christian kids, I said, you guys need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to be the most well-read, you need to… But I think sometimes in the ministry we have a lot of people who go into the ministry and they’re young and naive and idealistic and God’s going to be able to use them, but they’re not very wise. And we make a lot of mistakes and I can look back at myself 30 years ago and realize, I was pretty naive, but I think I had my eyes opened more than many, but I was still pretty naive.

Tim Streett:
But I think we can make a lot of mistakes because we don’t understand fatherless boys.

Phil Edwards:
Right.

Tim Streett:
Because we haven’t really well, we got to dive deep into the psychology and know what fatherless boys go through in order for us to be able to understand how we can effectively minister to that child. If we don’t understand the void in a child’s life who is without his father, a boy in particular, who was without his father, well, he doesn’t have a dad, so he’s going to love me. Why wouldn’t he throws his arms around me here? I’m a father figure. But if we don’t understand the trauma of the children experience, if we don’t understand the rejection they experience, we don’t understand the fatalism and the deep seated inferiority that grows out a result of being rejected by what should be the most prompt, most important relationship in your life.

Tim Streett:
Then we can’t minister in an effective way. We have to understand that and I think this is very biblical, that our view of God is going to be most informed by our relationship with our earthly father. And if we’ve been rejected by our earthly father, then we were going to reject God, because we’re assuming he’s going to reject us. And if we’re going to love a child with the love of God, we have to understand that deep pain and that deep trauma they have. And then you add on top of that, the trauma of violence and drugs and other things in the neighborhood. And we have children we’re ministering to children nowadays who have deep, deep, psychological issues based on the traumas that they’ve experienced in their lives. And so the wonderful thing about a place like Shepherd is that we’ve grown enough and we’re old enough.

Tim Streett:
And we’ve been around long enough that we’re big enough that we can have people on our staff. We can have professional counselors on our staff who can teach us the rest of the staff, how we should be doing, and they can direct the counsel. That’s really difficult to do in a ministry with three staff people. And it’s really difficult thing for us to expect our mentors to understand, but if we can surround the kid with lots of different supports and programs and you’ve mentioned the continuum, the cradle to career, but if we can understand these assets that we’re talking about now and how we can empower them with these assets, then we can see some success in helping kids stabilize their lives.

Phil Edwards:
Yeah, true.

Andrew Green:
I’ve seen us too, just personally, and as a ministry, sometimes that it’s easy for us to think we have the right answer for what somebody else needs to do. And that’s all around us in society, but I think, especially when you’re in a helping profession, it’s easy to come into one person’s life or a neighborhood and say, oh, I see you need this in the neighborhood. Or boy, if you just had this, if you could just do this, and I think that’s a mistake that I’ve made and a kind of ongoing temptation, maybe for all of us to identify what somebody else needs as the solution to poverty in their case. And I think listening well is a great response to that kind of temptation is hearing what people are saying and letting people identify for themselves where they’re at and understanding trauma and a lot of cases, or just understanding a lot of life circumstances by listening well is something that I’ve continued to learn.

Tim Streett:
Yeah. I think one of the early mistakes I made was trusting people. We talk about needing to earn trust, right. But I think it was a clear mistake in trusting some folks in the neighborhood who burned me and then saw me as a fool. You know what I mean? And I remember one particular incident early on just after we’d moved into the neighborhood and we’d lived in Austin and Chicago. So this wasn’t our first inner city neighborhood to live in. But I was trying to, there was a vacant lot in the neighborhood that people were throwing furniture and trash on and everything. And I had arranged, I had gotten a big pickup truck and I met these three boys from the neighborhood. This was before we’d opened to Irish sports. And so I was trying to get to know the kids in the neighborhood.

Tim Streett:
And so I asked them if they would be willing to earn some money to do some work. And they were eager to do that. And then something came up and I had to leave and I went ahead and paid him in advance. He came home and the job wasn’t done, there wasn’t a surprise it, was it? But I don’t know if that hurt my relationship with those kids ultimately, but I never really was, they were pretty tough kids. I was never really able to earn a relationship with those guys. But I look back now and that was foolish of me. I wouldn’t do that with a contractor working on my home. I wouldn’t pay him in advance and these kinds of things, but I think what those kids probably walked away from that thinking boy, that guy didn’t know anything, what a fool, I can’t believe, they got paid and they left and I think we have to, the scriptures say be innocent as a lamb and wise as a serpent. And I think if they see us as fools, then you know, then why would they listen to what we have to say? So…